A lot accomplished...

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between yesterday and today -

• Assembled and set cold frame back up. We even remembered without any directions! There were a couple of worn spots in the plastic at stress points and we patched these with some duct tape (of course). Otherwise, it looks great. I cut up the old grill cover that was heavy denier fabric and used that for the flooring, covered by one layer of landscape fabric. This should hopefully keep the grass and weeds from growing up into it like last year. There are two plastic 3-gallon kitty-litter jugs filled with water to provide radiational warmth during the nights. I may add a couple more – these worked well last year. I put several trays with potted plants in the cold frame – things that I won’t be planting out this year for whatever reason. Most are perennials anyway, so they should be good, though several are just small seedlings. There are also some less hardy plants that usually don’t survive our winter outside and hopefully they will make it with this protection.
  Inventory of pots: Raspberry, Monarda ‘Raspberry Wine’, Ajuga ‘Chocolate Chip’, Zebra Grass, Lavender ‘Munstead’, Vervain, Monarda lambada, Rosa rugosa, Waxed Begonia, Crinum Lily, Aconitum, Lamium, Rosemary, Calendula, Tansy, Colorado Blue Spruce seedlings, Gaura, Heuchera (3), Vinca, Hosta (2), Peppermint

• Put in bulbs – Daffodil ‘Mount Hood’ and ‘Geranium’; Garlic; Walking Onions. Dug up the Canna to store it for the winter.

• Cleaned out the rest of the Veggie garden. Pulled out the Peppers and Beans, and whatever stalks and stems remained of anything else. The Nasturtiums are still blooming, so I left them alone. The Broccoli is still producing florets and new flowers are blooming! I am still waiting for the seed pods to dry; they are fat and bumpy and clearly have seeds in them, but they are as green as ever. I found one nice carrot about 4 inches long. I set it on the steps to take in the house later, but it was gone when I went to get it. I think Darby probably ate it.

• Cleaned up Herb Garden and Garden Workshop area. Repotted two chives that I had basically just thrown haphazardly in pots when I dug them up from the Veg Garden, but they still continued to grow all summer. They are now together in one large pot with potting mix. Put bags of potting mix on the sunporch for winter repotting use. Dumped out pots of old soil into compost pile. Stacked pots that were basically all over the place into one area. Threw out all the broken and useless pots. Weeded and pulled the dead weedy stuff out of the Herb Garden. Pulled out the Basil and composted that. Cleaned out the workshop sink. The Feverfew has grown substantially and looks like it is still growing. The Borage as well is still growing, better now than it did all summer – it never did get any flowers.

• Worked with DH to do some weeding in his Driveway Birdhouse Garden (which I haven’t added to Folia yet – maybe this winter). Between the weather and his charity motorcycle runs every weekend, his garden has been sorely neglected. Fortunately most of what is planted there needs little attention, but the weeds, wild native plants and bird-seeded plants really moved in. We stuffed full two of the large yard-waste bags and there is still plenty more cleaning to do. But it does look better. I have to say the area where we had put the organic Preen early in spring had the least amount of junk growth. I think we will definitely use that again next spring in here.

Whew! I’m tired…